In September, Doubleday will release a book by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk calledMother Teresa: Come Be My Light. Father Kolodiejchuk, the postulator for Mother Teresa’s sainthood cause, has collected the amazing woman’s writings into a volume that shows the intensity of her holiness. Particularly revealing are the sections that highlight the severe “dark night of the soul” that haunted Mother Teresa for years.
An interesting article in Time that ran yesterday quotes Christopher Hitchens discussing what is revealed about Mother Teresa in the book:
“She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.”
Hitchens still doesn’t get it. While others are awed by Mother Teresa’s life of good works and love for the Lord, even during the years she felt distant from Him, the famed atheist sees even more to loathe. But this is no surprise coming from Hitchens, whose book ranting against the saintly nun, The Missionary Position, contained not one footnote to support his charges. Hitchens can rage all he likes. Most people will not be swayed. As Time reports Father Kolodiejchuk has said, “The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on…And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn’t ‘feeling’ Christ’s love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, ‘Your happiness is all I want.’ That’s a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms.” After all, as Mother Teresa herself wrote, “I accept not in my feelings–but with my will, the Will of God–I accept His will.”
